ScienceDaily: Space & Time News

Dark matter guides growth of supermassive black holes Posted: 18 Feb 2015 09:34 AM PST Every massive galaxy has a black hole at its center, and the heftier the galaxy, the bigger its black hole. But why are the two related? After all, the black hole is millions of times smaller and less massive than its home galaxy. A new study of football-shaped collections of stars called elliptical galaxies finds that the invisible hand of dark matter somehow influences black hole growth.

Dust to dust: Disintegrating rocky exoplanet could unlock secrets to how our solar system was formed Posted: 18 Feb 2015 04:31 AM PST Exciting new research has opened up the chance to find out what distant planets are made of. A team of astronomers have made observations which can help reveal the chemical makeup of a small rocky world orbiting a distant star about 1500 light years away from Earth, increasing our understanding of how planets, including ours, were formed.

The strange case of the missing dwarf Posted: 18 Feb 2015 04:27 AM PST The new SPHERE instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope has been used to search for a brown dwarf expected to be orbiting the unusual double star V471 Tauri. SPHERE has given astronomers the best look so far at the surroundings of this intriguing object and they found -- nothing. The surprising absence of this confidently predicted brown dwarf means that the conventional explanation for the odd behaviour of V471 Tauri is wrong.